Articulated time — Dames’s term for the experience the chapter produces: reading divided into intervals with edges, so that a life or a history is felt as a sequence of episodes. §3.1.
Capitulum / kephalaion — Latin and Greek for a “little head”: a division of a text, originally created as a finding aid, usually with a summarising heading. The chapter’s ancestor. §3.1.
Chapter architecture — The pattern a book’s breaks and larger divisions make as a whole, considered as an object of design. §6.6.
Chapter break — A structural boundary placed deliberately within the stream of scenes and sequels, whose position determines what a reader carries with them if they stop. §2.1.
Cliffhanger — An ending on visibly unresolved danger or crisis. The most expensive exit available and the fastest to fatigue. §4.1.
Closural allusion — Herrnstein Smith’s term for content that signals ending by association: night, sleep, departure, death, silence. Free closure, and dangerous for that reason. §3.5, §8.10.
Echo close — An ending on a resonant image, gesture or line, carrying thematic rather than plot charge. §4.4.
Event boundary — In cognitive psychology, the point at which a perceiver segments continuous experience into a new event; marked by a measurable processing cost. §3.6.
Feuilleton — The serial novel printed at the foot of a French daily newspaper, and the format that produced the highest-frequency chapter endings in the history of fiction. §3.3, §9.3.
Intertitle — Genette’s term for the title of an internal division: a chapter or Part title. §3.4.
Number (part-issue) — A physical instalment of a serially published Victorian novel, typically thirty-two pages and three or four chapters. Often the real unit of design. §3.3, §9.1.
Number plan (the “mems”) — Dickens’s surviving working notes for each monthly number, showing chapter allocation and scheduled withholding. §3.3, §9.1.
Offered exit — This chapter’s term for the chapter break considered functionally: an opportunity to stop, whose price the writer sets. §2.1, §3.7.
Payoff — What a chapter’s ending does with its proposition: resolve, escalate, hold open, re-interpret, or exchange. Inherited by Chapter 16 (The Ending). §6.3.
Permission to stop — The chapter’s first principle: every break offers the reader an exit, and the final sentence sets its price. §3.7.
Pivot — An ending on a reveal or turn that sends the reader forward with new urgency. §4.3.
Placement strategy — Where a cut falls relative to the six beats of scene and sequel. Twelve are tabulated at §6.4.
Principle of proportion — Chapter length, relative to neighbouring chapters, is read as a claim about tempo. §5.1.
Proposition — The question, tension or intention a chapter raises at or near its start. §6.3.
Question close — An ending that raises a statable question without the danger a cliffhanger implies; a curiosity instrument rather than a suspense one. §4.5.
Recasting close — Proposed in this chapter. An ending whose final sentence changes the meaning of the chapter just concluded rather than pointing forward, so that the reader looks back. §4.6.
Segmentation — The division of a continuous text into units. Dames’s central category, and the chapter’s subject. §3.1.
Soft landing — An ending on a settled, resolved beat, making the exit free. The type that makes the others legible. §4.2.
Zeigarnik effect — The finding that interrupted tasks are recalled better than completed ones; the usual psychological explanation of the cliffhanger, with a mixed replication record and heavy moderation by motivation. §3.6.